Survival guide for a hostile administration

The federal government is not just cutting data, in some cases it is actively destroying it. For journalists and independent researchers working on climate, immigration, and other politically targeted fields, the threat landscape has changed fundamentally. Newsjunkie reporter Morgan Kriesel spoke with Lauren Ranca, a researcher with Tactical Tech and project lead of Exposing the Invisible, about how investigators in conflict zones and authoritarian contexts have handled exactly this kind of crisis, and what those hard-won lessons mean for researchers in the United States right now.

“…there's enough data: We don't need more, but we need people to investigate it.”

Your project Exposing the Invisible is interesting to me because it seems to have an ethos of empowering individuals—democratizing and decentralizing information and the investigative process—and an emphasis on the idea that there's more information out there, already accessible, than we might think.

On that last point of information that’s already out there, I saw a term in Exposing the Invisible articles: “open source intelligence.” Can you explain what that means and why it's important to what you do?

The definition of open source intelligence (OSINT) is information that you can find openly, uncensored, and freely available to all.

We tend to use a combination [with open-source software]. When we say OSINT, we mean open source intelligence, or freely available information, but also—the tools you use to process it are expected to be transparent, openly available for you to investigate. So it's not just about finding accessible information, but also about trusting the tools you're putting that information into. [Ours is] a more extended approach to open source intelligence.

You could also call it open data, which is probably the more traditional term used in research. OSINT is just a cool term that citizen investigators, fact-checkers, and people doing investigations outside of traditional newsrooms tend to use — partly because it sounds important. It does actually come from law enforcement. It wasn't invented by citizen investigators or civil society. Government intelligence makes use of OSINT a lot. And therefore, it's a term that's become popular in a certain community of citizen investigators, I would say.

We also use [the term] in order to identify with that community, that sometimes feels a bit detached from journalism. But they really aren't, because they're using the same methods and processes, sometimes even more transparently than newsroom journalists. They have to prove a certain path of finding information and building evidence piece by piece. They don't have the luxury of an editor or a support team, so they have to prove themselves. While constructing the whole story, they also have to show others how to deconstruct it back to the essential evidence.

Journalists have started to like the term too, because it connects them with another set of methods they've maybe been using anyway, and gives them an identity of, "Oh, this is actually what I'm doing." And it avoids the word "data," which puts a lot of people off. When you say "open data," some people immediately imagine spreadsheets and tables and databases that have to be formatted and analyzed, and they say, "I don't deal with data. I'm not a database person." But it doesn't have to be a database. OSINT has a different energy to it.

It's more-or-less trying to incorporate or welcome as many types of investigative approaches as possible.

I was reading the interview you did in Multitudes magazine in 2022, and you said (this is translated by my browser from French, so let me know if there's errors), "There are now more opportunities to… create new organizations or networks that can gain support. It is therefore less a question of the need to produce one's own (new) knowledge than of… opportunities to establish collaborations, trust, and support in general…, which can support independent investigators outside of the ‘official’ media models."

Can you explain what you meant by the idea that there's less of a need to produce new information? Is most of the information we need already out there?

I think what I meant was that on one hand, there's lots of information that's unexplored—and we don't even know it's there. I'll give you an example. Last year I started exploring deep-sea mining and the data that exists from mapping the seabed. A few years ago I knew nothing about it, and I didn't know what kind of data existed. I slowly started discovering, by talking to various people, that there's an enormous amount of data about the seabed and oceans that is accessible but almost never used by anyone, apart from a few companies who know about it and are trying to keep it to themselves.

The concern is this: there's a handful of companies producing massive technology to mine the seabed. Scientists are fighting against it, saying, "You're destroying the last frontier of healthy ecosystems, because the ocean is keeping the planet alive." The companies say, "No, our machines can grab what we need and not harm anything." And then there are scientists mapping the seabed who say, "No — there are actual ecosystems here that are unique in each area, they don't exist elsewhere, and if you damage them, they won't restore, because it took millions of years to build them." And overseeing all of this is a governance body that sits in Jamaica—the International Seabed Authority—that decides the regulation around who has access to exploration and exploitation of the deep ocean for minerals we need to build more devices, feed AI infrastructure, and so on.

IInitially I thought, "Oh, there's not even data on this.” Then meeting people, I built a picture: Actually there's a lot of data. There's been data for a long time, it’s just people don't know where it is. Only scientists and certain companies know where specific datasets are. And oceanographers sit on a lot of data. A scientist from one country has data from one region; a scientist from another country has data from a different region. They don't necessarily know about each other's work, or what it connects to.

So there's no central place for the public to access this?

There are ways, but if you don't know the data exists, you don't know where to look or who to ask. We use a quote from Crofton Black, an investigative journalist I like a lot: "You don't know what you don't know." He's built his entire methodology on helping journalists realize how much they don't know — asking questions to identify the blind spots.

You don't know what you don't know, and because of that, you don't look for it. That was the case with ocean data, which is a topic that we've been digging into for the past two years. And we will keep on digging as we try to bring more people together who are interested in this topic, and try to [encourage people] to investigate it further. Otherwise, they're gonna mine it and nobody will know apart from scientists. You're gonna have NGOs campaigning against it, and states are still gonna give licenses, and the Jamaica Seabed Authority will still give licenses so only a few companies can make lots of money.

So are you doing the prep work—pointing people at this data, and making it more available—so that when those battles come, those political advocacy battles, that it’ll be easier for them? Is that the goal here?

We started slow, with a guide about the fact that there is some data that exists out there, and the fact that there are scientists and really hardcore experts on the topic who are willing to talk to any journalist interested. That could be used by journalists, by advocates, by researchers, or by anyone else.

We worked with two oceanographers — one who works on a submarine mapping the seabed, and one who is a data scientist helping oceanographers process the data they collect. Together we put together a guide on ocean data that's now in the Exposing the Invisible Kit. It's not a huge guide, but it's a starting point for journalists or researchers or advocates who want to dig into this topic.

We're also trying to bring more people together — physically, at the events we organize — to grow a little community around the topic. We did get a small EU investigative grant for a group of people from different organizations — one from Deutsche Welle, one from an organization called ACDC [Anti-Corruption Data Collective] — to look more closely at which companies are involved and where the governance currently stands. It grew, very slowly, from one guide into something that has at least a few more eyes on it than before.

But going back to your question about the fact that there's enough data: We don't need more, but we need people to investigate it. And I think what's needed is to put together people with the same thematic interest, or the same type of approach, to help them get stronger, basically.

A lot of the work I've been doing involves speaking to ex-federal scientists who've been fired or have had their access cut. There's real panic around the disappearance of their data. I'm thinking about things like the EPA's Risk Management Program database—it had a publicly accessible map of polluting facilities, and that map is now gone, the data is behind a request system [which provides much less information].

I've been looking at your article on how to use European air pollution data. What I've seen mostly in US coverage is just, "Hey, this data is gone, and it's really bad." But what I haven't seen any coverage of is: other countries also collect this data. Do you have recommendations for similar international databases that might include US data, as alternatives to what's been taken down?

That's a good question, and honestly I don't have specific experience in the US context, but I know who to ask. I can ask Olaya [Argüeso Pérez], the journalist who wrote our EU pollution piece. She used to run a whole news desk on environmental pollution, so she has contacts even well outside the European context. I'll reach out to her — and if she doesn't know, she'll know who does.

I can also connect you with Tyler McBrien. He's US-based, library-affiliated, and writes for a law journal. He does podcasts on OSINT on the side and works with people doing various kinds of investigations, particularly in the lawfare area. He might know about some of those databases, and he's a good general contact in this space. He's very engaged in the whole area of investigation, reads a lot, and likes to connect people.

“...collaborative work… [is] how a lot of organizations are filling the funding gap. ”

In the Multitudes interview, you also talked about investigators needing to make their work more narrative, more story-driven, more accessible to regular people. What have you seen since then? What's worked?

Storytelling is crucial to any work. If you work with lots of data, it won't help your audience if you can't tell the story. And it's not only the story of the entire dataset—it's about having an entry point, a story that captures a wide audience that feels like, "This is accessible to me. I can understand the purpose of this information. I'm interested in this one part, or something about it outranges me, or I find it fascinating." There are many ways to enter a story apart from raw data.

What's become a real thing in investigative work—and actually in research generally—is storytelling approaches, looking at different formats that various age groups or communities tend to prefer, but also just putting together a narrative. That's been quite neglected in the investigative space, in civil society investigation, whether it's media or citizen investigators. It's been left aside for a long time. But in the past few years, people have been realizing the story is essential. It's not just data skills—it's the actual way of engaging communities, communicating with communities, getting the right human sources who can make a great addition to the data you have, or help you collect the data you don't yet have.

In terms of specific things that have worked: we've started recommending to organizations we work with—small NGOs, media NGOs, community reporting organizations, or groups working on specific issues like climate or political influence—a reconnection with communities on the issues they care about. But not just going there and parachuting in to interview people. It's about workshopping problems with communities. Literally organizing workshops about what they're facing and how they identify the problems.

Not "who is to blame"—everyone will blame the local government or the central government. It's more: What do you actually believe the problem is? Where do you think it's really coming from? Is it historical? Is it economically traceable? Is it pollution? Lack of funding or misuse of funding? Like, you actually can show when the problem started and why.

So it's going to them and letting them lead the story?

Exactly. And these aren't always journalists doing this— it's community communicators, researchers, people working with journalists. Sometimes it's people from the community starting the process and going to an NGO and working out the steps together: "We have a problem. We really want the media to write about it, but nobody takes us seriously, or if they do, they only write about the company and blame the company and it's obvious they're to blame, but nothing happens." So it's about telling the stories with the communities.

We've worked with a few organizations in Latin America, in some African countries, and in Europe. Having communities act as the experts—because they actually are—and not as just the source, and the victim, and the disempowered group, helps bring back support to the media. And then the media actually does start growing, because that community support is essential to grow the organization, whether it's a media outlet, a research NGO, or a group of researchers working in a school or university on social issues.

One project I particularly like is the European Housing Project—about how entities like Airbnb and others have been taking over big cities and how people get pushed out of flats they've lived in for 20 years. It got international support and an audience far beyond what I expected, because housing is an issue that's internationally valid in big cities everywhere.

But even at a smaller scale, letting communities build their story from the problem they identify—and building the evidence alongside them—makes people go: "We do find relevance in caring about the media presence in our community. We do need to support organizations doing local reporting about what is affecting communities." And that investment of time—because it is expensive in time, if not always in money—pays off.

And I think [in the 2022 interview] when I said that it's easier now for new organizations to set up, it was easier, but actually since then it's become harder for organizations to [form] because of the funding issue. There's far less money now than two, three years ago. So I'm now contradicting myself (obviously), because of the context.

There was a time when you would have funders interested in growing the independent media scene. Now, the interest is self-sustainability, because the funders have withdrawn from media, and they've gone other places. But what's gotten easier is collaboration across organizations and across independent journalists, or investigators, or researchers and organizations.

That combination of collaborative work—it's not just easier, it's just become normal. It's expected. Eight or ten years ago, collaboration was the new thing: "Wow, you're collaborating. What does that look like?" And we had to struggle to get people to see the value of journalists working with artists, or with technologists, or with scientists. Now nobody's shy about it. Journalists have fun collaborating. It's in their practice now.

And with that normalization has come a new way of creating value: building products out of knowledge. You have a story, and you can build a workshop, a training, a methodology guide, an educational package that libraries can purchase, an exhibition installation, something that can be sold or adapted. You give the knowledge for free, but if anyone else wants to use ready-made tools, that gets sold now. That's how a lot of organizations are filling the funding gap.

And you're not necessarily selling them to your peers, like to other NGOs who have [the same funding difficulties] as you have. But you're selling them to different institutions that you trust working with that information?

Of course. Not governments and so on, but, policy institutions, research institutes, universities, libraries (like I said), schools, foundations, or richer NGOs.

A lot of the federal scientists I've been speaking with are attached to their institutions even after being fired. They're not ready to consider what civil society can do. It's been frustrating. Do you have advice for reaching people who are used to being the only authority on their subject and who want their institution back the way it was?

It's about finding the weak link, let's say, in the process. You can't always get to the person who holds the most knowledge or influence, but maybe you can get to someone they trust really well—someone more open to collaboration or to the idea of finding another way. That person can then influence others in their community, their group, their chain of relationships.

It's the same strategy I used when working on financial crime and organized crime. Nobody wants to talk to you the first time, especially if you're not backed by a very well-established organization with a reputation. But they might talk to a lawyer, or an accountant, or an assistant—someone you know has a connection to them. You go to different entry points. In your case you're not trying to get something out of people to expose wrongdoing; you're trying to help them. That should be easier, but it isn't always. Still, the strategy is the same: find someone from their network, their peers. Befriend their friends, and their friends will eventually introduce you to the circle.

There's also a grief period. When something like this happens, people can't just skip that. Maybe in a year the anger passes and people start reasoning again, or they realize it's gone and they have to do something new. You can try to find someone else to reach the others. Something will happen. They can't keep going on like this—even after a change of government, even if you disagree completely with where you are, you either shut the door completely, or you try to live with it and find a way. And they will find a way.

“I haven't met anyone in the past few years who says they can detach from their sources.”

You made a great point earlier: Working closely with the people who are feeling the impacts [of what you’re investigating], who are going through that very human kind of struggle, will make your work more interesting. And I think forming relationships also makes your work more interesting, which is very antithetical to the whole “objective” view of journalism. It's very different, but I think I'm with you on that. It's something that is holding us back in the modern era—these old standards of being detached from your source.

I haven't met anyone in the past few years who says they can detach from their sources.

It used to be a trend. And in my own practice as an investigative reporter in Eastern Europe, it was possible to get detached from certain things. But not when working on very socially intense issues. But more and more journalists I work with (and these are people identifying themselves as journalists, not just citizen investigators) who report on deportations, forced migration, environmental issues affecting local communities—now it's more rare for me to hear about anyone who's able to detach.

All I hear from people working on forced migration or deportations are new ways to get closer to their sources and stay close, because they feel their contribution is beyond writing the story. It's about following what goes on with the source, with the source trusting them enough that they're no longer just a source but someone who helps the journalist understand what's happening at a larger scale. Because it's so hard to earn the trust of someone so they open up and help you write a story about deportations, or about someone staying somewhere illegally where nobody should know they exist. You can't develop that relationship and stay detached.

For these journalists, it's become more like a personal fight than writing a story and moving on. They've become part of the communities they're following. I know a lot of journalists who are struggling mentally because they don't want to let go of this work. It would be healthy for them to let go, but they just don't want to. They feel they're the only ones doing it, and if they drop it, there's literally nobody else who would have the guts, because everyone knows how hard it is.

Where is the line between fostering those relationships and getting in too deep, to the point of harm?

There are people I know, from past and present work, who have had to take a break from journalism because of mental health—you can no longer handle writing about things and not being able to help anyone, or being blamed by the people you wrote about because, even though you didn't expose anyone by name, the whole community gets affected when you write about certain issues.

Some people have learned the lesson and are able to switch topics. But there are people—quite a few I know well, particularly in Greece because of the issues there with deportations and police violence—who keep going even when they're exhausted. They feel a responsibility. They've built a profile working on this topic, so everyone goes to them. Everyone who wants to leak something goes to them. And they feel, "I can't stop, because if I stop, who are they going to leak it to?"

There are more people joining and doing this kind of work, so it's not that they're left entirely alone. But there are people who have the whole experience and expertise, and everyone is counting on them. And that's not just one country or one area—there are many like this in many other places.

There are quite a lot of programs now working on mental health for journalists, and it's helpful for some. I've seen people who have had a lot of help and are very much grateful and functional because of it. But I'm also seeing people who don't feel they should get that help, or just don't want it. The acceptance of mental health services is a long battle.

“…technologically speaking, you can no longer believe you're isolated, or well-protected while you're working.”

One last question about the Multitudes interview: You talked about the concept of the “lone-wolf” investigator and how it's not really possible anymore. You think of the typical investigative newsroom as a bunch of reporters working together, so not quite lone wolf. So, who are you talking about when you say that?

I think the age of the lone wolf is over, or at least the context of the past 20 years hasn't been favorable for it. It was maybe easier to work in actual secrecy on a story before. Now you're connected on every level — whether you're communicating, storing information, or researching. Everything that happens is more or less connected to the internet or to other people, networks, and sources of information. So by default, technologically speaking, you can no longer believe you're isolated, or well-protected while you're working.

The other issue is that the people you're investigating have always been one step ahead—they're conducting crimes and you're tracing them, not the other way around. And they've also gotten better at using technology. So information travels faster and there's more of it, and it's very hard to manage alone.

When I said "lone wolf," I meant it in terms of both capacity and safety. Working in a network is always better for safety than working alone. Having other people know about you, your whereabouts, and what you're doing is better than nobody knowing you exist. There are very unfortunate cases of journalists who did things on their own without their colleagues or newsroom knowing, and ended up in trouble with no one aware. On top of that, you're much more efficient working internationally with peers in other countries—especially if you're tracing corporate corruption, because money no longer hides where the people who own it actually live.

The other thing is ego. There used to be a real priority around being the first to break the story. That's still important, obviously—but I think the network effect has tempered it. It's no longer "I want to be the only one, the first one." It's "I want to do a big story, and it will be bigger if it's collaborative, and I'll probably be better protected if more people are with me." The competition now is really about who can tell the story the best, who can reach more audiences, who can build products out of the knowledge they've created. That's where the energy goes now.

So when you said “lone wolf,” you were thinking more like these whistleblower types who were trying to protect themselves. Like Edward Snowden, somebody working by himself to expose something huge.

So yeah, that is not a viable option anymore. You do have whistleblowers, but even [Snowden] wasn't working alone.

These are massive exceptions. When you work with a whistleblower or a leak that you definitely don't want exposed — and I'm thinking of how ICIJ [International Consortium of Investigative Journalists] handled the Panama Papers, the Luxembourg Leaks, the Offshore Leaks — they had one source inside an offshore registration company, and they had to protect that source while sitting on enormous amounts of sensitive data: politicians, mafia, organized crime, everyone who had set up shell companies in offshore havens to move stolen money out of their countries. If you have a source leaking everything—emails, files, official company documents—you want to keep that as close to secret as possible. So that had to be kept very tight. It took them almost two years to publish the first batch of verified stories.

You don't want to work with random groups; you work with a very small, trusted circle. That's still not a lone wolf, but it's the closest you get. The actual lone wolf in that scenario is the whistleblower. They are the loneliest ones, because if they don't want to be exposed, they have to be kept secret. Up until you share the information, you're alone. And in Snowden's case, it was a much tinier group who knew. But he wasn't alone either.

So because of where we are with technology today, you're probably going to be exposed no matter what. So it's better to work together, and to work together to protect your most vulnerable sources from the exposure that's most likely coming?

Yeah.

“Think of this as a process you revisit regularly, not something you do once. Map your actions, map your interactions, map your devices. Know who you're up against. “

For investigators and researchers working with sensitive data right now—especially people working on climate, immigration, or with LGBTQ communities, communities the current administration is specifically targeting — what security and safety advice do you have?

It's a big topic and a big responsibility, so I can't cover it completely. But here are the core principles.

First: forget about the tools for a moment. You're never going to be completely isolated from harm, whatever tool, or practice, or paranoia-driven methodology you can develop. The idea is to know who you are against, and who's against you, first of all. That's how we start, with what we'd call an environment assessment, rather than a risk assessment.

Map every action you take. You go online, you talk to sources directly, you call, you message, you share files, you receive files, you store things. This sounds obvious, but people forget a lot of their regular actions because they're so embedded in daily practice. They say "I conduct research online" but that's not all they do. They store things, send things, save things, make copies. Do you know where all the copies are? Map your actions carefully, then map your interactions, then map every device that holds any trace of those actions—including the phone you carry with you everywhere. And remember: the cloud is not an abstract entity. The cloud is a computer. Stuff sits on physical servers somewhere. Think of it that way.

Then ask yourself: where do you feel you're at bigger risk? Is it while you're browsing and collecting information? Storing? Downloading? Traveling with devices? Talking to people about work? You may decide you should talk to fewer people about sensitive work. That's not about being a lone wolf—it's about limiting the interactions that put you or your sources at risk. Then, and only then, look at the tools.

Some people go paranoid at first when they map everything out and realize how exposed they are. But you calm down, because now you actually know. You know exactly what you're doing and where you're weak. That's far better than not knowing.

Then know specifically who is on the other side. If the US government is against you, none of the lists of alternative tools is likely to save you completely. These are governments with massive technological and financial power and very skilled institutions. If you work transparently and publicly, it's very hard to hide. So either you change your practices substantially—which some people do, because of the profile of their work—or you accept you can't hide completely, but you take steps to be less obvious, and you protect the most sensitive specific steps you take.

For sources in exposed communities: be aware that even Signal, which we still use and recommend in Europe, is no longer considered reliably private in the US context—authorities can apparently be compelled to release connection data, associating phone numbers with usernames. At minimum, make sure sources aren't registering on Signal with their normal phone number. Find ways to communicate through intermediaries where necessary. And ask yourself: does this question actually need to be in writing? Can it be a meeting? Can this communication be stored somewhere entirely separate from you and your home, with no connection to your address or devices?

On tools in general: we've developed a set of criteria for choosing tools that we now apply to AI tools as well, since you can't avoid them. One key criterion is open source. If the tool's code is open and transparent, other people with expertise can audit it—they can see whether it leaks information, whether there are weaknesses or backdoors, whether it does what it claims to do. You don't have to be a developer yourself to benefit from that. You just need to know: has it been audited? What do those audits say?

Another criterion: where is it hosted? If you have a problem with your data being hosted on US servers, or servers subject to US law, then you look elsewhere. Iceland, for example, has some of the strongest media and data protection legislation in the world. It was built by a group of technologists—people who called themselves hackers—working with investigative journalists, who were part of a political party specifically set up to protect freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom of the media.

What is this party called?

The Pirate Party. One of the founders is a man named Smári [McCarthy]—I worked with him years ago at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, where I learned my investigation skills. He helped us build the first-ever international cross-border corporate records database, about 15 years ago. He's a former hacker who became a minister. The Pirate Party got enough power in Iceland to actually propose and pass legislation, with enough media lawyers and copyright lawyers to write it well. Those laws went through. Iceland has since become a place where quite a lot of people in the strong privacy and security field recommend hosting servers — small Icelandic-based organizations hosting servers specifically because of the legal protection. The EU has also increasingly pushed American platforms out for data protection reasons, so if you're choosing where to store sensitive information, Iceland and certain European jurisdictions are worth knowing about.

On the question of do no harm: that is the main principle in safety and risk assessment, and it's also the point of journalism. You want to expose things. But the mission of journalism is not to do harm — it's to expose things and let the people responsible for taking action deal with it afterward. Not harming anyone, including the person you're exposing, and especially your sources, is where everything starts.

Think of this as a process you revisit regularly, not something you do once. Map your actions, map your interactions, map your devices. Know who you're up against. And when the government changes or escalates—as has happened in the US—revisit the whole plan, especially the interaction with sources, because what was acceptable risk before may no longer be. Whatever you built before, it now has to be completely reinforced.

I do recommend reaching out to Nikita Mazurov at The Intercept. He's a digital security researcher and trainer based in the US, with a completely different level of knowledge and contextual awareness than I have for the US specifically. The Intercept has a good security team and they're very socially engaged. If you want to discuss this further, or organize something around security in your community, Nikita would be the person I'd point you to. My knowledge comes from my own experience in Eastern Europe and with Russian organized crime. The US government is a different animal.

“…the whole country is struggling... A common mission, and a few people or groups…, can do a lot to make a difference...”

At Newsjunkie, we've been talking a lot about documenting disappearing data—creating a record of what's been removed, altered, or censored, even when we can't save it. We're working with the National Security Archive out of George Washington University to build a database of all the instances of removal, disappearance, and alteration—trying to make it searchable and transparent.

I think there’s an interesting kind of new role that media institutions and these—I kinda wanna call them “middleman institutions”—can play. We have so much information all the time, but it’s creating these curated pockets of it where it's clean data, it's thematic data and you can use it for your reporting. What do you think of that kind of role?

I think it's very important and useful. And I think it may also lead you to people who have access to things you don't know still exist. Once you start publicly talking about things you can't find, people who can find pieces of it will reach out — people who have access to information that was lost, or who don't know that what they have is important, or how it might connect to other things others are holding. Documenting the absence can inspire people to come forward with what they have.

This approach—documenting the nonexistent, the things that have disappeared—is something I'm seeing more of in investigative art and research that crosses between art and investigation. You can no longer see what disappeared. You don't have proof it existed. So you document the unobservable, to remember that it was there. Working with censored files, blacked-out documents, gaps in the record—that's its own kind of investigation.

I want to mention an organization that I think is very relevant here: Mnemonic, based in Germany. They work on conflict archives — the Syrian War Archive, the Ukraine Archive, the Yemen Archive, and now Palestine and Israel. But the concept behind it applies to any massive, sudden endangerment of data.

It started with one Syrian journalist in exile who fled the war and thought: there's so much visual proof out there of what's happening, and nobody's collecting it, and the media only has access to what their parachuted journalists can get. He started collecting videos on his own—just a journalist who knew how to work with information, encountering a new kind of information and not knowing exactly what to do with it. We actually met him at an event where we bring together people who have a project idea and match them with technologists, designers, data analysts, graphic artists. He had the concept. We connected him with people who could scrape video platforms, build archiving systems, and handle the technical infrastructure. And it grew.

What makes it important is the verification layer. They verify everything thoroughly—location, timestamp, source—so that lawyers building cases can actually trust the data without having to redo the entire chain. And that matters enormously, because the International Criminal Court is now using material from their archives as evidence in international court cases. He didn't start it for that. He started it so that the media would have access to visual evidence from people who were actually facing things on the ground. And it ended up being something much bigger.

I've been seeing activated pockets of the US research system that have this really strong mission bringing people together, but it's not consistent. So what we're trying to do is create the mission, the overarching theme, for the whole of research that's been impacted, and create one hub where people can go. We can bring more people in, that way, and get them to work with each other more.

The lesson is that one big push—not big in the sense of being financially rich, but big in intention—can actually hold something that would otherwise completely disappear.

With Mnemonic, for example, it was a very small initiative at the beginning.  It was a one person, basically, who started the whole concept—visual war archives to act as evidence, once the war is done or during the war. So the concept itself was big and important, and it was big enough that many other people thought, "Oh, that's actually a big idea. And you need more people. So here I am, I can do this. I know how to scrape videos from various platforms. I know how to store data. I can develop an archiving system for you." And so it grew.

I think that in a context like this, where more people with skills find that they can have a common mission to safeguard information, I think it's very important to build this—it's like a movement that builds, in a way. And people feel like their skill is put to good use there.

It's also how a lot of citizen investigators start working. They don't have a journalism background, but they know they wanna do something that exposes something harmful, and they have a part of the skill that's needed. Maybe they can work with data really well. Or they're good with people, at talking. Or they're lawyers who have a legal background (and you need a lawyer every time). Or an accountant if you're working with financial data, and so on. So this is how a lot of people get attracted to doing something for the common knowledge—they find that spot where they can actually contribute.

And I think in this case, you are struggling—the whole country is struggling with some big push like this. A common mission, and a few people or groups with a set of skills, can do a lot to make a difference in this.